We booked a family cruise to celebrate Achilles’ first birthday even before he was born. And I thought to myself: I have so much time to plan for this, so I kept putting it off. I had also put off finishing my book, and I had already missed the deadline of my birthday.
Costumes? There’s plenty of time?
Excursions? I got that in a minute.
Luggage? Pfft. I’m a master by now.
Learning how to self publish on amazon in a week? Ha! Leave it to me.
And then September rolled around, and I had done nothing.
You know that saying, “Time flies when you’re having fun?” Apparently, parenting is a shit ton of fun because time flew like it was on a mission to beat light.
And here I was, days before the cruise with nothing done. I was in a panic, but eventually I got around to most of it (including the photoshoots I agreed to do without having the time for them—typical of me). Except for the book…. I left that torture for the post cruise days…
So we got on the cruise. I will admit I cried when I saw it. I felt so privileged to be on a Disney cruise. It had only taken me 31 years to be on one, and I felt like a kid again (who was this for again? Hey, it was my birthday too).
It seemed too good to be true. There were so many fun things to do, and I looked forward to having some alone time with my hubby and friends. Then on day three, the full saying came to fruition: we got a call from the nursery; Achilles had a fever of 103 and had to be cleared by the ship doctor.
He never really got better; he had high fevers for the remainder of the cruise. He was miserable and so were we. But we still tried to make the best of the beautiful vacation we had planned. In the few hours his fevers broke, we dressed up and took pictures and enjoyed as much as we could. I learned for the first time, that vacations with kids can literally turn into vacations from hell in a minute. All three of us got sick… and I was dying to come back home by the end of the cruise.
It took us over a week to get over the nasty bug… but then I got Strep. And I learned that being the mother of a small child and being sick are not two things that work well together. I was dying with fevers, and I still had to manage doing everything for Achilles. Making him his food, looking after him, playing with him, etc. My throat was killing me, and I still had to be his mom. Another lesson: mom’s don’t get to call out… we have to suck it up and deal with it.
It was as if all the stars had lined up against me. And there was that pesky deadline I had given myself for my book. I had set up a presentation date at my local library, and I had six days to pretty much finish my book from scratch.
Needless to say, that didn’t happen. It took me three weeks to master Kindle Publishing, especially since I was practically dying and alone: hubby had to work and my MIL had left to my BIL’s house. But I punished myself for having procrastinated; no matter how bad I felt, I was going to do it.
It was pretty much hell, but I managed to make it through… and I feel like I can pretty much get through anything.
It’s funny how going through things we often feel like there is no light at the end of the tunnel… and then when we are at the end of the tunnel, we wonder how it is we almost gave up when it wasn’t all that bad. Still, it was a challenge I reluctantly accepted and completed. I was so proud of my self on September 28th when I clicked publish….I had survived, but more importantly, I was a published author.
